Picnic at Porokorro

1

THE CURRENT of the River Niele is deceptively calm, even by day.

At night you could reach the bank and think you were looking out over a small, still lake, round which the elephant grass whispered occasionally in the breeze.

In fact the whispers come from the gentle overlapping of long, thick, screwing tendons of water which sweep over the diamondiferous gravel and through the skeletons of half-submerged trees which—from Porokorro right up to Bornu Island—diggers have gouged from the bank and left to rot in the shallows.

Porokorro means the Place of Bones.

Manga grandfathers will tell you that here, when they were children, were battles between the war-boys of the Kuru and the Manga; they can remember the painted corpses, lying out on the banks, rotting; and in the sky, small as carbon flakes above burning paper, the marks of more distant battles: slow, high, banking schools of vultures—turning . . . turning . . . the sluggish, low-geared wheel in the clock of Africa's prehistoric economy.

This was only yesterday.

The man who sowed never knew who would eat the crop.

Then came the DCs and a short period of relative peace—sustained by Europe, even while she was disembowelling herself in scientific wars. There was peace in Africa—it is true—but in the bush the sleep of time was over.

Last month, one dawn, a shape broke the surface of the Niele's black waters and grunting breath belied the river's gentle, trickling whispers. Soon sounds of struggle broke out as though the dead branches and leathery fallen creepers had become alive under water, and were now feeding.

Splashing started, became desperate; then ceased. A feeble quadruped dragged itself a few feet up the bank and sank to the ground where for a time it might have been a flat reptile, or even nothing—a long bit of raised earth.

Then at last it rolled over and faced the sky—with the face of a man—a white man.

He was young and nondescript but in his staring eyes there was now to be seen that tenuous, rare perception which sometimes gleams autonomously in the muddy blank bottom of anyone's absolute exhaustion and reprieve from fear.

At the camp we were all still asleep.

I have looked up the day: it was the morning after the dry-season storm. A Friday, my diary says.

Earlier, on Thursday evening, in the middle of crashing thunder and roaring rain a rumour of trouble at one of the plants had spread through the camp.

The way the rumour was received and quickly magnified showed to what extent people had been waiting for a repetition of last year.

Cool, hard-working men who normally never alluded to even the possibility of new trouble now said simply Perhaps this is it, or Here we go again.

Then as the hours passed a few facts became available; The rumour was toned down.

Roberts, who was recently seconded from the police proper to our own BMT Security, had carried out one of the raids which were a point of controversy between the Administration on the one hand and ourselves (The British Minerals Trust) and the police on the other.

He found, as anyone could have, any night, Africans digging on BMT ground. Encouraged by recent bags, and BMT gratitude, he determined to break all his own records. Instead of cutting off a few fugitives, he ringed a whole crowd, including the Cowboy —a character, called after his hat, who seemed to be some kind of leader. The result was that his own force, of twenty African Guards, got hopelessly strung-out, finally scattered, while he, with a corporal, plunged into the bush after the Cowboy.

Roberts (who just missed the war) was nearly capped for England at rugger. He has often taken prisoners by himself, far from his men, like a full-back tackling a winger near the base-line. The Licensed Diggers were said to be out for his blood.

No one knows whether it was a trap. He suddenly found himself surrounded by about fifty young men armed with spades, picks and matchets—and by the Cowboy in person.

This came out afterwards. At first the bare news that he had been captured was brought by his African sergeant in a jeep.

This was about 6 p.m. during the storm. We understood a detachment of police proper went out to Porokorro at once. But we heard nothing more that night.

None of us had had time to get to know Roberts well. That, of course, is one reason why there was nothing approaching a vigil on his behalf. Nevertheless it struck me as strange there should be so little concern. Reaction compared unfavourably with the atmosphere in an infantry regiment when a new officer or private was lost on a fighting patrol. I mention this in passing because, perhaps, it is part of the reason why the whole story seems to me worth telling.

Roberts of course was well paid for the special work he did for the BMT and he recently moved into a BMT bungalow, inside the wire. Such a bungalow would compare favourably with any living unit in the colony, except the three-decker villas of the big company managers on the coast, and one or two of the residences; and once he was inside it he came in on BMT perks which, to other Britons working out here, are a sort of PX to their NAAFI.

(Our Haig, for some reason, is 22s. 6d. and Players are three bob for a tin of fifty. We have golf course, tennis courts, swimming pools all set in a shrubbery as good as Kew.)

Of course, in return for this raising of his living standard, he had to accept certain snags. We are none of us allowed a private car and there is certainly a good deal of supervision which people with frayed nerves have gone so far as to call spying. But what else could we expect ? Diamonds are the most portable form of wealth in the world—and we are surrounded by the vast African continent, where frontiers are easily passable, communications often non-existent and shelter available somewhere for anyone, if he can pay well. Most of us would agree the general situation, justifies a measure of control. Roberts merely made the choice we've all made.

At breakfast, it became known that he had escaped by swimming and was back in camp.

Most of what followed in the next forty-eight hours, both in the camp and on the site at Porokorro became, in time, general sketchy knowledge, but I shall tell the story as it seems to me it must have happened.

After five years here I am in the position of knowing most of the dramatis personæ fairly well.

Number One —as he was usually called—Tom Barber, half British, half South African, was a small man with a craggy, rather monkey-like face. He sat, as little as possible, between his huge desk, like an old-fashioned sideboard, and the vast BMT safe, which occupied the whole wall behind him. The safe glowed with three different coloured lights, hummed and was so modern it had no door. The desk had a long ivory wand.

In his high place, Barber looked like some kind of wizard, ready for and capable of anything.

This fantastic impression was reinforced by a lion-footed, tapestry-backed, gold-valanced chair—the fantasy of a big business duke, which stood amongst all the streamlined modern office equipment as out of place as a knight-in-armour at a World Hygiene Conference. It was used at Board meetings by the Chairman (Lord Heatherlake) and had been flown from London. There was a crucifixion motif in the tapestry, but the whole surprising effect was of a prop for Number One's wizardry. Swipe his chair and his wand and he'd beg for mercy.

In fact Barber (magic apart), as we shall see, was far too streamlined and alive to the ridiculous to enjoy such a piece of vulgarity. Perhaps the Board liked it. Who were the Board? Who was the Chairman ? Sometimes we saw the word Heatherlake printed on our Christmas cards. But this did not put us in the picture.

We understood diamond sales were an all-but global monopoly of the De Beers group; and that we came in on the ail-but—the six per cent which is not De Beers. Did this make our contribution chicken-feed? The question is like asking whether the world is small. For us the BMT was professionally vast—it was everything. And the relatively greater vastness of the De Beers empire, and of its affiliated Diamond Corporation was remote as Mars.

To most of us such names and even our own name—BMT—didn't mean much in terms of glabal statistics and so, I think, many of us, if asked about our set-up, would have had a fleeting, crystallising vision of that extraordinary chair, which was all we ever saw of the top.

Perhaps you have to be a little mad to flourish physically in high positions under a modern social-democratic system.

Barber was not flourishing, even before the trouble started.

Until recently the BMT had a monopoly of all alluvial diamond mining rights in the colony—that is except on the ground leased to the Licensed Diggers (natives of the colony who had paid £30 for a digging licence).

Last year a company, said to be native owned, but in fact financed by Greeks, the Santa Barbara Native Diamond Trust (SBNDT), was allowed by the Native Administration (NA) to put up a bid for the Kaidu river zone which the BMT had already prospected and for which Barber had already started negotiating treaty-rights with the customary chiefs, and with NA.

This native competition caused, I'm told, a minor sensation in that stratosphere of which we at the camp saw little except the chair and the Christmas card. It was said: Number One's having a rough time.

Our Piper Cub, Two-seater Moth, which town-cries arrivals and departures to everyone, indoors and out, was always on the buzz. Rumour was rife, though what really happened can never be known, except that the Greeks certainly got the rights.

Gossip said: Firstly it suited the Native Administration to have two diamond firms at work in the country. One could be played off against the other. Secondly, the up and coming politicians did not want to be tied totally to British capital when the day of Independence came. Thirdly, and most important: one of the Greeks concerned was a friend of two African lawyers—both prominent elected members of the NA—both of whom were soon announced as directors of the new company.

Clearly the BMT tender never had a chance. Barber never had a chance. Not that he alone conducted the final negotations (Heatherlake himself came out), but he was, however, the man on the spot and we understood that his brilliant record was slightly tarnished in the eyes of those people we never saw. It was thought he should have been more in with the up-and-coming Africans. Indeed perhaps that was why he and not a pure South African, had been appointed.

Barber, I imagine, reacts to criticism like flesh to fire, I'm sure he couldn't bear to fail. Certainly in the last weeks his blue eyes have stood out more than ever coolly and calmly, but his small, rather jockey-like, body seems a bit more craggy, his face more frayed.

He has been living about seven lives—none of them private. And as one who sees his reports I know that throughout the complex negotiation for the new zone, illicit digging here at Sangoro had been on the increase until it was reflected sharply in the production chart which hangs by the portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh, on the safe.

Only recently—since Roberts' prangs, had there been an improvement—making the graph look something like this —stabilised, even slightly ascendant.

Now this . . . this new trouble at one of the sites.

Barber switched on the fans and then stood looking out of the window in front of him. The sun was retrieving the storm as though it had been a mistake. Clouds, columns and shreds of mist were everywhere.

Already boys had started watering again, giving the huge floppy bungalow flowers the endless transfusion they need.

Barber had the expression of a man halted at a crossroads in unknown country. There was no sign-post.

I don't think he wanted to come to a cross-roads. He knew all sorts of people in British public life by their Christian names—M.P.s, Directors, Proprietors and titled folk; even artists and writers. He did not talk of them—which leant weight to the rumour he would soon be going to London for some even higher appointment. No one in the whole camp made such effective fun of the ludicrous gilt arm-chair as he. In fact it was a passion with him. I believe he had a substantial private income. To most of us he was likeable—though odd.

The length of his jaw-line was his most striking feature, except for his eyes. His eyes gripped you—and meant to with an almost fiercely intimate no-nonsense, all-in-this-together stare—I think they meant to reveal, and perhaps did, a refulgent, tough, general decency. And yet—there were subjects which, apparently, he simply did not hear. Three of these were politics, and colour, and class. If cornered, he would say I'm a miner in a quiet, untypical tone.

The intercom beside him buzzed, just as Dickson the General Manager came in and took his place at a little desk, in the corner.

Dickson said, That's Roberts now.

Dickson always spoke to Barber as though somebody might be listening.

Dickson is pure South African, and like Roberts a rugger player. He is really an intellectual of sorts and says the whites are losing their sense of responsibility to the African. His eyes are slightly protuberant and his frequent silence, which fits so ill with his vivid, eloquent, though bulbous stare, seems to me a restraint which has made inroads on his health.

The fact that these two men at the top are known to be South Africans (though to my mind Barber is much more British) often lends a submerged, nagging and unhealthy vent to the camp atmosphere, which is something like Berlin during the air-lift.

People forget that there are good reasons for South Africans heading a diamond enterprise even in a British colony. There have been diamond mines in South Africa for a hundred years, none in Britain.

But there is no end to our irrationality. I have seen an employees antagonism to our South Africans become worse the more he was exasperated by relationships, in technical matters, with African subordinates.

And I have heard the same men who asked for the searching of Africans' clothes, while the owners stand naked, to be conducted in private—for the chap's sake—one day, and the next, after some theft, want it done more thoroughly and on the spot.

And wives who suddenly wake up one morning and feel they're in a luxury concentration camp and say they'll start screaming—sometimes blame Barber and Dickson—the South Africans—for the atmosphere.

Perhaps it's easier, certainly more OK, to vent abuse on them than on . . . what? Indeed, just what! Out here, people say and they and they . . . and Home; and we never forget the riots last year, which are usually referred to simply as last year.

You can understand then how a certain conniving, nearly furtive speech might have became a habit with Dickson. The political wind in the colony and even in the camp was against him . . . (against them, Dickson would have insisted).

At the same time his—and Barber's—responsibilities were vast. Unlike anyone else in the camp they were in personal contact with the men at the top, with London and Johannesburg; and they were sitting—when you come to think of last year and the still fresh memory of the Kuru rising in the 'twenties—on a bomb—a D-bomb (as the newspapers called it) of light, breathtakingly light, ubiquitously convertible wealth. All in the middle of nowhere and guarded by only ten European and six hundred African policemen—the latter being looked upon largely as gas was in the first war: the wind would change and then you'd have them against you.

Even loyal—it was a small force when within a radius of fifteen miles of the camp there were about 30,000 licensed—or more likely unlicensed—diggers, many of them from as far afield as the Sudan, Senegal and Dahomey, without a penny in their pocket.

Send him in, Barber said into the intercom.

2

THERE WERE not many seconds to wait before Roberts came in.

Our silence in the BMT camp has sometimes seemed to me like the silence of engineers in engine-rooms. Of course there is the heat and sweat of an engine-room—even in the fanned offices—but that is not what I mean. There is a listening, responsible, half-distrait quality as though the silent person must keep count of some other, general all-embracing important noise—which could threaten danger within a single, off-beat tick.

Even in the mess the pause while a glass is raised, before someone says cheers, becomes fraught with absurd suggestion.

Is there a walrus just behind us—or something like that?

In the racing seconds Barber said, The Secretary and the Provincial Commissioner are flying in this morning.

Dickson's face underwent a tiny convulsion and he stirred as though violently bored by the utterance of this among many certainties.

There was the sound of a step and Barber got up and went to the door.

He led the young man in like a bride.

Dickson said, Good morning to you, in a friendly sardonic tone.

Barber was a great admirer of good generals, war heroes and athletes. He read every word that was written about them, and knew things like where and how Lord Gort won his V.C. and even the tactics, if any, of the Afghan campaign of 1878. He himself had two M.C.s though few people know it.

He pulled out the gilt arm-chair and when it was halfway out suddenly said Christ with realistic agony and almost fell into it. Roberts went to help him. Barber said, Together—NOW, and they got to it in the middle with a sudden rush.

Have a chair. The Commode of the Vanderbuilts—the Stool of the Baskervilles. Have you had anything to eat? He said it all intimately as a friend.

Roberts said he had eaten a bit. He sat unselfconsciously in the chair. It was the third time in eight days that he had sat alone with these two men.

Barber took him in with eyes that were perhaps too obviously appraising—and praising; eyes that seemed conspicuously to defer to Roberts.

By Christ, he said. You're glad to be back, aren't you?

Roberts smiled.

Barber and Dickson had known him so far as fairly talkative.

They just waited.

But his eyes dropped; he did not talk.

Barber hitched himself up on the edge of the aircraft carrier and used his eyes, his personality; waited. Dickson had slewed right round.

But Roberts said nothing. He looked suddenly shy, and sometimes like a dog seeing things.

They got you . . . Barber cautiously, tactfully coloured the statement with humour if that was how Roberts wanted it.

Yes . . . they certainly got me, Roberts said, only half accepting the humour.

Can we have it . . . from the beginning.

The young man made an effort. He seemed all the time to be thinking of something else. He was fresh-faced, rather ordinary-looking.